This Guy Recently Revealed Big Plans to Change the Bible — and Raised More Than $500,000 to Achieve His Goal

306

Shares

Email this story to a friend

Adam Lewis Greene is on a mission to provide a “fresh alternative to reading … biblical literature” with the launch of his Bibliotheca project — an effort to simplify the Bible and make it easier to consume.

“Today, our contemporary bibles are ubiquitously dense, numerical and encyclopedic in format; very different from how we experience other classic & foundational literature, and completely foreign to how the original authors conceived of their work,” reads a Kickstarter page about the effort.

Image source: Kickstarter/Bibliotheca

The description continues: “By separating the text into several volumes, and by applying classic & elegant typography, Bibliotheca is meant to provide a fresh alternative to the reader who wants to enjoy the biblical library anew, as great literary art.”

Greene, who has said that he wants the end result to be “elegant, simple and pure,” aims to amend the Bible’s layout in an effort to make it more fluid, with plans to adjust the type size, words per line and spacing.

Additionally, rather than chapter divisions, the Bibliotheca Bible will be presented in the American Standard Version (ASV) translation of 1901 and split into four volumes, each ranging from 450 to 650 pages — akin to four separate novels that can be more easily consumed.

Greene, who has a background in book design, plans to modify certain terms in the ASV version to swap in modern alternatives. For example, “doth” would be changed to “does” and “sitteth” will be amended to “sits,” according to the Verge.

Watch Green describe the project below:

While Greene set out to raise $37,000, his Kickstarter campaign has brought in a staggering $553,452 — a phenomenon that has left him slightly perplexed.

“Though it’s hard to know exactly why Bibliotheca has been so well received, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that readers are ready to enjoy the Bible as the great literary anthology that it is, rather than as a text book,” Greene recently told Bible Gateway. “The idea of the Bible as story is moving and spreading rapidly. I have been deeply affected by this movement, and Bibliotheca is my attempt to create an elegant vehicle for it.”